1. Negative Future Outlook
1.2 Media
The reason why perception and reality are so far apart is simple and straightforward: the media.
No, no, the media isn’t lying to us. These aren’t "fake news". The murders and accidents they report on really happened. The war they talk about is indeed taking place. Of course newspapers can make mistakes. But there are enough murders, accidents, war casualties, and starving children in the world to keep all the headlines and articles forever filled. Making them up would just be more effort. And if you’re caught lying too often, that’s bad for business.
To assume that there’s a grand conspiracy by the media to feed us bad news is not only detached from reality, it wouldn’t even explain the phenomenon if it were true.
After all, even the conspiracy theorists only claim that the media wants to hide the "truth" from us. And the "truth" is whatever these people believe to be true: that the government is implanting microchips through vaccines, that the world is controlled by a Jewish global conspiracy, that aliens have already been living among us for a long time.
Even if that were true: none of that sounds like positive news...
So: Why don’t the media bombard us with positive news the way they do with negative ones? Where are the screaming headlines "Fewer Young Children Died This Year than Last Year!" or "Global Literacy Rates Have Risen!"?
Well, compare it to headlines like “Tornado Devastates Coastal Town in the USA!” or “Family Brutally Murdered in Break-In, No Trace of the Perpetrators!”
Which headline is more likely to be clicked on? Which article gets more readers? Where is there a concrete reason to report on it right now as breaking news?
Almost always the negative headline. And that’s exactly the problem.
Newspapers and TV stations are businesses. Businesses of attention. What can I do to sell as many newspapers as possible, get the highest ratings, or as many website clicks as I can?
Humans are wired by evolution* to focus first on potential problems and dangers. The media is profit-driven and largely reports on problems and dangers because that’s what brings them attention, customers, and profit.
Of course, this leaves us with no clue what to do about it. Capitalism is what it is. Most reporters are honest people who really try to do their job as well as possible.
There have already been many initiatives for more quality journalism and well-researched background stories. Kickstarter campaigns and fundraisers to help journalist groups write better news.
Alas, none of it has made much of a difference. Media corporations are getting better and better at holding our attention. And they do it with an endless flood of negative news. The portion of the population willing to spend a lot of money on quality journalism is vanishingly small.3
And social media only makes everything worse.
As much as we might criticize greedy media corporations, at least they have to care about their own reputation. And at least the news there is written by trained journalists, most of whom bring a certain professional integrity to counterbalance the corporation’s profit-seeking with their personal ethics.
In Germany, we also have public broadcasters, which at least provide some counterbalance to private corporations and offer an alternative news source that isn’t solely focused on ratings and profit. They are therefore more likely to report on positive developments.[2]
In social media, on the other hand, all of us are the ones making the news. By writing our own opinions, by posting pictures and videos when we find something we want to share.
But much more importantly: by sharing what catches our attention. And what catches our attention is first and foremost negative news. Things we can get upset about.
Whether what we share is true, though—who knows? Often, we cannot judge it. And unlike journalists we have no professional ethos to verify it before spreading it.
The dissemination happens in multiple stages. You share it with your acquaintances, your acquaintances share it with theirs, and so on. At each of these stages, this filtering effect repeats itself: negative and emotional news is amplified, while positive news fades away. Largely independent of its truthfulness. Such a repetitive filtering effect works like an exponential function*. Like in the story of the rice grains on the chessboard squares (see Chapter 2.1): one becomes two, then 4, 8, 16, 32,... like an avalanche.
Which means that at the end almost no one has seen the picture of the beautiful flowers you posted on Facebook. Yet everyone saw the fake news about the young girl raped by foreigners.
In short: on social media, false but highly emotional news spreads much more widely than true, positive news.
And so all of us learn over and over, through specific stories and news, how bad our present is and how terrible our future will be. In books, movies, video games, news broadcasts, newspapers, and social media.
With films and novels, the question of truth doesn’t even arise. We all know they are fictional, and we read or watch them because we want to.
With the media, the accusations of "lying press" are so far from reality that it’s no longer funny. First, because each individual report is, in itself, true. And second, because the issue isn’t whether even worse things are being concealed, but rather all the positive things in the world!
So, on one hand, all of this sounds quite terrible. But on the other hand, isn’t it good? Why the alarm that things are actually better than we believe? Won’t we gradually notice this ourselves when the dire predictions don’t come true and the future turns out to be quite alright?
Put differently: Why is this even a problem? Except that people could be happier than they are?